Desperate bid to distract us

In Tuesday’s Express, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley’s communications adviser Keith Subero continued his diatribe with regard to the concluded findings of the T&T Police Service into both emailgate and Cambridge Analytica, comparing the investigating officers “not like cartoon characters, but the comical Keystone cops”!

Is this a signal that the scandal-plagued People’s National Movement is attempting to give oxygen to two key propaganda issues and scams that they inflicted on the country?

On Cambridge Analytica, the police concluded that the “alleged unlawful accessing of electronic data” had been investigated and was now closed.

On emailgate, the case was closed after the DPP decided that the evidence did not reach the threshold required for criminal charges.

Instead of accepting these decisions, Dr Rowley launched an extraordinary broadside and sarcastic attack on the police, saying “the authorities in the British Parliament and the US Congress are delirious and the Trinidad mentioned in all these proceedings is not a real place but a location in a movie on Netflix and all the subject of someone’s imagination”.

Mr Subero’s column, “The Cambridge Analytica fiasco: state of disbelief”, was the second that he has written on this matter, the first on April 1, 2018 under the heading “Who’s accountable for Cambridge Analytica scandal”.

In both columns, the very misguided Subero seems fixated with this Cambridge Analytica issue but could not produce a shred of evidence into any breaches of the country’s data privacy laws by the previous administration.

And on Tuesday he added emailgate.

On May 19, 2013 Dr Rowley, as opposition leader, stood up in Parliament and boldly produced fake emails which were malicious, false, misleading and scandalous. These concocted emails accused the former prime minister, her attorney general and other cabinet ministers of a large-scale conspiracy to undermine the justice system and harm a journalist in an attempt to bring down a duly elected government.

The irony is Mr Subero contradicted his own opinions when he writes, “I concluded that the entire police investigation was wrong-footed.

“My research suggested that the 31 emails involved were not actual emails but were drafts. This may have been an exchange of drafts among parties.” So now they were no longer emails but drafts. Did Subero share his opinion with his boss?

Subero’s admitted research adds to Faris Al-Rawi’s “dotishness” that “even if the emails are fake… the substance of the content was worth investigation” … the height of stupidity!

It will take more than the partisan pen of Dr Rowley’s communications adviser to create a political distraction and change the national conversation.

The PNM won the 2015 general election with cheap propaganda, dirty politics, false promises, lies and fear which misled the majority of right-thinking citizens into making the wrong electoral choice and caused them to be blind to the obvious.

This upcoming general election will be a referendum of the desperate Keith Rowley-led PNM Government which, in five years has plunged Trinidad and Tobago from being a rich and prospering democracy to one that is becoming a dictatorship on the brink of US sanctions and collapse.

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I hadn’t intended to write a word; my feelings were raw and I felt that everything I could possibly say had already been expressed. I had already begun writing about something else for this column, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t feel that it was right to let my exhaustion with the ongoing brutality of humankind shunt me away from a principle I hold fast.

EARLIER this week, the Minister of Housing officiated at a ceremony organised by the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) in which 500 lucky would-be homeowners stood to benefit from a random television draw for the allocation of State housing. This was the expected end of the line for at least those persons, some of whom would have submitted applications since who knows how long ago.

I lived in Falcon Heights, Minnesota for most of the 18 years I resided and worked in the state, teaching at the University of Minnesota. I was offered the job there in 1990, and subsequently bought a house. Falcon Heights is a suburb that is equidistant from both Minneapolis and St Paul, the capital, about a ten-minute drive away from both cities. For most of my time there I was the only black person owning a home on my street, and indeed on adjoining streets.

Here in sweet Trinidad and Tobago, we have jumped on the bandwagon and stood up and expressed our diverse views on the ongoing racial tensions in the United States, but I ask us to step back and look at our country.